anthropology

An eye-catching new study shows just how different the experience of walking home at night is for women versus men....

A new research paper finds that genetic material from Neanderthal ancestors may have contributed to the propensity of some people today to be “early risers,” the sort of people who are more comfortable getting up and going to bed earlier....

Survey the sex lives of Homo sapiens, and you’ll find couples, throuples, harems, and other arrangements of lovers. Fidelity, adultery, and ethically non-monogamous unions. How could one species have evolved myriad ways to mate? Concerning sex, what is natural for us humans?

Why did humans take over the world while our closest relatives, the Neanderthals, became extinct? It’s possible we were just smarter, but there’s surprisingly little evidence that’s true....

Bastards

The species lived in the Middle Pleistocene, an era that took place 774,000 to 129,000 years ago. The Homo bodoensis is thought to be the most direct ancestor of humans.

Smithsonian article linked about the new study: smithsonianmag.com/…/research-reveals-the-natives…...

Some researchers have suggested that women’s role as hunters was confined to the past, with more recent foraging societies following the paradigm of men as hunters and women as gatherers. To investigate that possibility, Anderson and colleagues analyzed data from the past 100 years on 63 foraging societies around the world,...

Indigenous people entered North America at least four times between 12,000 and 24,000 years ago, bringing their languages with them, a new linguistic model indicates. The model correlates with archaeological, climatological and genetic data, supporting the idea that populations in early North America were dynamic and diverse....

A little-known dog lineage with fur so thick it was spun into blankets was selectively bred for millennia by Native Americans of the Pacific Northwest until its rapid demise following European colonization, a study in Science showed Thursday....